CATASTROPHE IN PHYSICS

Einsteinians would never give the account of their century-long
activity that an "enemy" would give:

http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second
postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin
that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together.
Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate
farce!....The speed of light is c+v."

Still sometimes accounts produced in Einsteiniana are surprisingly
similar to Bryan Wallace's one: the catastrophe in physics is often
described in an equivalent way and only the ultimate cause, Einstein's
1905 false light postulate, is more or less camouflaged. It seems
Einsteiniana's unbearable absurdities are capable of bursting even
minds that create and teach them, minds totally alien to any
rationality:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/ind...ecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep...ntum-mechanics
"Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum
Mechanics"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...ilderness.html
"Former Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find
the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like
a house of cards with nothing to replace it. The controversial
physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in
quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts
contemplating a "plan B", failure could lead to "chaos and
infighting". He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years
of scientific theory..."

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html
John Baez: "On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to
explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics
into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which
tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into
account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track but
until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or both,
our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic.....I realized I
didn't have enough confidence in either theory to engage in these
heated debates. I also realized that there were other questions to
work on: questions where I could actually tell when I was on the right
track, questions where researchers cooperate more and fight less. So,
I eventually decided to quit working on quantum gravity."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is
right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his
instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and
time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that
it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a
malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of
stars, planets and matter."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a
happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did
bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news
of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such
rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a
comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it
as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one.
We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to
preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured
all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the
stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho Valev wrote:
Einsteinians would never give the account of their century-long
activity that an "enemy" would give:

http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second
postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin
that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together.
Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate
farce!....The speed of light is c+v."

Still sometimes accounts produced in Einsteiniana are surprisingly
similar to Bryan Wallace's one: the catastrophe in physics is often
described in an equivalent way and only the ultimate cause, Einstein's
1905 false light postulate, is more or less camouflaged. It seems
Einsteiniana's unbearable absurdities are capable of bursting even
minds that create and teach them, minds totally alien to any
rationality:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/ind...ecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep...ntum-mechanics
"Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum
Mechanics"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...ilderness.html
"Former Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find
the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like
a house of cards with nothing to replace it. The controversial
physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in
quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts
contemplating a "plan B", failure could lead to "chaos and
infighting". He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years
of scientific theory..."

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html
John Baez: "On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to
explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics
into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which
tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into
account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track but
until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or both,
our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic.....I realized I
didn't have enough confidence in either theory to engage in these
heated debates. I also realized that there were other questions to
work on: questions where I could actually tell when I was on the right
track, questions where researchers cooperate more and fight less. So,
I eventually decided to quit working on quantum gravity."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is
right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his
instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and
time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that
it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a
malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of
stars, planets and matter."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a
happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did
bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news
of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such
rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a
comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it
as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one.
We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to
preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured
all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the
stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

Pentcho Valev

The reality of Postscientism is a nightmare for more and more people
nowadays:

http://www.dailyastorian.info/main.a...icleID=6 6439
How science has crippled our world view
By Tom Bender, For The Daily Astorian
"With the atom bomb [in fact, with the 1919 eclipse], Einstein became
a god, and our sciences froze into unchallengeable dogma that what we
had stumbled into was the total and absolute truth. We are now paying
the costs."

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock
Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages
57-78
"The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and
research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who
raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A
winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of
Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are
then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics.
Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of
elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing
question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these
circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on
scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of
realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the
theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of
professional discourse."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Einsteinians would never give the account of their century-long
activity that an "enemy" would give:

http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second
postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin
that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together.
Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate
farce!....The speed of light is c+v."

Still sometimes accounts produced in Einsteiniana are surprisingly
similar to Bryan Wallace's one: the catastrophe in physics is often
described in an equivalent way and only the ultimate cause, Einstein's
1905 false light postulate, is more or less camouflaged. It seems
Einsteiniana's unbearable absurdities are capable of bursting even
minds that create and teach them, minds totally alien to any
rationality:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/ind...ecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep...ntum-mechanics
"Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum
Mechanics"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...ilderness.html
"Former Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find
the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like
a house of cards with nothing to replace it. The controversial
physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in
quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts
contemplating a "plan B", failure could lead to "chaos and
infighting". He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years
of scientific theory..."

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html
John Baez: "On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to
explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics
into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which
tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into
account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track but
until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or both,
our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic.....I realized I
didn't have enough confidence in either theory to engage in these
heated debates. I also realized that there were other questions to
work on: questions where I could actually tell when I was on the right
track, questions where researchers cooperate more and fight less. So,
I eventually decided to quit working on quantum gravity."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is
right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his
instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and
time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that
it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a
malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of
stars, planets and matter."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a
happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did
bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news
of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such
rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a
comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it
as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one.
We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to
preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured
all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the
stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

Pentcho Valev

Catastrophe in physics: the following two texts coexist and are
treated with the same indifference by the postscientific community:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/204892
"You might think there are no new revelations to be made about him,
but for Einstein groupies the current volume addresses at least one
key question: what did Einstein know about an 1887 experiment that
discovered that the speed of light is invariant, regardless of the
observer's speed or direction of motion—an idea that forms the core of
special relativity and that Einstein did not mention when he laid out
the theory of special relativity in a 1905 paper? Called the Michelson-
Morley experiment, it disproved the existence of the ether, a
substance once thought to carry light waves and form an absolute
reference frame for space. In their namesake experiment, Albert
Michelson (a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1907) and Edward
Morley (a chemist) showed that the speed of light is always the same
(now known to be 186,282 miles per second) relative to stationary
observers as well as moving ones. Nothing but light has this property:
if you are approaching a car that's moving 30 miles per hour, and
you're moving 30mph as well, the approaching car appears to be coming
at you at 60 mph. Not so with light. If you are traveling at the speed
of light, designated c, toward a light beam moving directly toward
you, it appears to be approaching at c, not 2c."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/arch.../02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

Pentcho Valev